Word: daft
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Richard's best friend and worst enemy is the daft, cheerful Gwyn Barry, whose glib utopian novel, Amelior, has rocketed to the top of the bestseller list. Stupid, shallow and immensely popular, Gwyn resembles Tod Friendly, the ex-Nazi from Amis' last novel, Time's Arrow. Of course, the public laps up Amelior, as Richard (who, as a soon-to-be-ex-novelist, has plenty of time on his hands) begins to plot revenge...
...through an unlikely airplane battle at the climax. But in movies like this, a man must stand alone. It's a mild hoot to watch Certified Great Actor Hoffman play an action hero. Note the Clint-like glint in his eyes, the terse authority he gives such endearingly daft phrases as "Idiocy is our only option...
...turns out, in Geoff Nicholson's cheerfully loopy comic novel Hunters & Gatherers (Overlook; 215 pages). Nicholson's hero, a feckless would-be writer named Steve Geddes, has unwisely taken a publisher's advance to produce a book on collectors. But the collector collector finds that his subjects, though daft, are stunningly boring. An obsessed gatherer of sounds has recorded utter silence in Namibia, the Sahara and the Australian outback. One human rodent, who promises to show Geddes the world's largest beer-can collection, leads him to a completely empty room. Curses, he says, my hostile wife and son have...
...turns out, in Geoff Nicholson's cheerfully loopy comic novel Hunters & Gatherers (Overlook; 215 pages; $21.95). Nicholson's hero, a feckless would-be writer named Steve Geddes, has unwisely taken a publisher's advance to produce a book on collectors. But the collector collector finds that his subjects, though daft, are stunningly boring. An obsessed gatherer of sounds has recorded utter silence in Namibia, the Sahara and the Australian Outback. One human rodent, who promises to show Geddes the world's largest beer-can collection, leads him to a completely empty room. Curses, he says, my hostile wife...
...with the divination process for its own purposes, maybe to mislead the client with a false message?" What if, indeed? The author's fizz of comic energy is as wild and scornful as Richard Condon's, back when Condon was young and frisky. And as was true with such daft Condon fables as Some Angry Angel, Dooling's story has no detectable point or purpose, except to marvel at the rich variety of human wickedness...